climate fuels
stoat | August 3, 2010
Quark Soup has a post comparing the spill to Niagara; and notes that the spill would be a cube ~93m on a side.
Checkling the share price (still hovering around 4.10, so neither good news nor bad) I see BP are starting to ask others to pay up for their shares. It will be interesting to see how that goes - through the courts, or quiet settlements?
Misc people complained at me when I previously said Incidentally, misc people have called this spill "unprecendented". That seems dubious (except in the traditional sense that 11 dead in Cumbria is headline news for days; 11 misc folks dead in road…
stoat | July 12, 2010And for BP's share price. Though in fact I came to this the other way round: the rise in BP's share price reflects a gradual re-pricing of the risk and damage extent, as well as the more recent news that the new cap-fitting seems to have gone well.
[Update: speaking of political risk - this is the kind of thing I mean -W]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10654584]
stoat | June 11, 2010I haven't been paying a great deal of attention to the actual *cause* of the oil leak, in the sense of whose *fault* it is (I mean, in the physical sense rather than any stupid legal sense). [[Deepwater Horizon oil spill#Investigations]] has some stuff. In fact I'll quote it, so we have a sort of agreed position to start from, if only to disagree with:
Attention has focused on the cementing procedure and the blowout preventer, which failed to fully engage.[216] A number of significant problems have been identified with the blowout preventer: There was a leak in the hydraulic system that…
stoat | June 9, 2010On the recent oil spill issue (possible disclaimer: I'm wondering about buying I bought some BP shares).
I'm thinking about headlines like Obama Says He Would Fire BP CEO, Wants to Know 'Whose Ass to Kick'.
[Update: both TB and H point out that this quote is taken well out of context; see the comments or http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/kicking-ass-white-house. So I have to partially retract my outrage. But only partially, because the main point still stands (who to blame?) as does the quote below -W]
The real story here isn't hard to see: Obama is desperate not to get blamed for…
stoat | January 31, 2010Says the Grauniad. Not the "Hurrah", I added that. The Grauniad doesn't come out for it being good or bad news. But I think it is. Emissions trading is a waste of time and an enormous waste of money, promoted mostly by those who hope to get rich on it.
Carbon Tax Now.
My previous post refers.
stoat | January 28, 2010This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I'll have a go.
First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the "proportion that stays in the atmosphere" with "the concentration in the atmosphere" otherwise you get silly little skeptics running around thinking that "airbourne fraction is constant" means that CO2 has stopped increasing. Sigh. However, I see that last time I looked at this I was having to slap down the…
stoat | November 7, 2009So says Sci-Am. The article is high on pic and low on facts. Only a small percentage of the CO2 is captured - 1.5% - but that is OK, it is only a demo plant. The key question, of course, is how much extra coal is burnt to achieve this? This vital fact is not clearly provided. The 1.5% is clear And now roughly 1.5 percent of the CO2 billowing from its stack is being captured... but the other half is vague: But the primary benefits of the chilled-ammonia process for capturing CO2 are lower electricity and steam consumption, compared with other potential technologies for carbon capture, such as…
stoat | December 13, 2008Because Kevin Anderson says that it is "improbable" that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm). Which blows Hansens target 350 out of the water. Not that it requires a luminary of KA standing to do that. Quite why the grauniad is using breathless climate-snuff-porn prose to report the bleedin' obvious I don't know - perhaps it really is true that people read the papers for titillation rather than news. Those with appropriate access can read what looks to be like the source paper (which begins with something I've been saying for a while, but he gets to say it in a nice…
stoat | December 11, 2008Every now and again the question of how much CO2 nuclear power plants produce, compared with other forms of power production, comes up; and whenever it does, I've forgotten where I last saw the figures. So now someone (thanks S) sent me some that look good (and are, by repute, biased against nukes if anything), I'll put them in here.
The original report is http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/hintergrund_atomco2.pdf but I don't read german, so I fed it through babelfish which seemed to a pretty good job. I'll skip all the boring caveats and stuff and just show the end result…
stoat | September 18, 2008Just a short post to draw your attention to mpgillusion.blogspot.com.
Update: now on RC
stoat | September 16, 2008On the list of things to read-n-blog since before the summer hols has been John Flecks oil-to-liquids post.
John says, quite perceptively, At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal... The question has been why they aren't pushing it now, with oil north of $120 a barrel? One possible answer is that the people who have skin in the game are not confident that oil will stay there.
Oil is now well south of $120, indeed its about $90 as I speak, though of course the exchange rate has also shifted in…
stoat | August 23, 2008I've been on hols again - life is tough when you have kids - and am working my way through the backlog. I find...
Friends of the Earth has a campaign to reduce CO2 emission limits for cars. Apparently:
* In October 2008 the European Parliament is to vote to adopt the European Commission's proposed regulation on CO2 emission limits.
* The proposed limit for new cars registered in the EU is to be 130g CO2 / km instead of the existing 160g CO2 / km.
* BUT Friends of the Earth believes that 130g / km is not enough and is campaigning for a more restrictive limit of 120g CO2 / km with further…
stoat | July 22, 2008As the price of oil has soared, so has that of coal. Both are demand-led. This is a very strong hint from the market that calls to phase out coal in the near future are doomed. Since CCS makes no commercial sense in the absence of meaningful CO2 limits, that too is doomed.
Just thought you ought to know :-)
stoat | July 10, 2008Seed has a new blog up, http://scienceblogs.com/energy/, and one of them is me. Atmoz isn't very happy about us all selling out (its sponsored by Shell). I can't speak for anyone else, but while I'm not going to disclose the fees, its only because you'd laugh rather than go green with envy :-(
I haven't decided what I'm going to write about when its my turn. Feel free to make suggestions.
stoat | May 20, 2008Originally this was going to be about politics, and the answer was going to be "not as much as his poll ratings suggest". But then I found a speech on Opec/Oil and the answer has to be, "yes he's crap". On so many levels.
He sez: Gordon Brown yesterday signalled a new determination to defend Britain's hard-pressed consumers and motorists when he denounced the oil cartel Opec as a scandal and called for the EU and the G8 to break down its control, saying it was holding back the development of the world economy. This is just stupid playing to the gallery. No-one believes that Broon is going to…
stoat | February 17, 2008A little while ago, I ventured into aircraft CO2, and as good as said that the climate impact of aircraft fuel use should be weighted up by a factor of 2-3 because of various side effects: I thought of water vapour being dumped in the stratosphere. It turns out I'm wrong on that: at the altitudes planes fly at that effect is small, and the extra radiative forcing is dominated by ozone (via NOx) and contrails. There is lots of uncertainty, but a figure of about *3 for the radiative forcing is plausible. The govt website http://actonco2.direct.gov.uk/index.html says it uses a factor of two.
But…
stoat | February 5, 2008A very interesting report by the Wall Street Journal reporting that "Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley say they have concluded that the U.S. government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants sometime in the next few years. The banks will require utilities seeking financing for plants before then to prove the plants will be economically viable even under potentially stringent federal caps on carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas."
If true, this is big news.
But is it true?
The linked article Leading Wall Street Banks Establish The Carbon…
stoat | February 2, 2008A post from Eli about offsetting CO2 emissions from flights raises once again an issue in my mind, which I don't think I've whined about here (do remind me if I have): why is aircraft CO2 special, and requires offsetting, whereas heating your house, driving to work, and all the other things you do to emit CO2, don't.
Is it because people who fly clearly have too much money and so can afford to bung in a bit more for guilt-geld? Is it because a lot of people fly on business (which includes scientists) and so can get the indulgences free with the flights from their employers? Or is it because…
stoat | January 30, 2008Following in the tracks of DeSmog again. So, the $1.8B carbon capture and storage commercial scale demo has fallen apart [archive] due to excess costs (or possibly other things: here is what they say; there seems to be some dispute over the siting. Since this is probably largely a boondoggle, which town gets the jobs is probably an important part of the project). This is bad news for all the people (including Hansen) who are counting on CCS to rescue us from our woes.
[Update, 2015: it hasn't got any less dead says Brian at Eli's.
stoat | January 21, 2008Well, its more interesting than CorbynWatch. So, Nature sez:
New power stations across Europe could be routinely fitted with carbon-dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology within two years under a proposal by the European Commission.
Which had my jaw dropping. In 2 years? The technology simply isn't ready. And predictably enough, the very next paragraph sez:
Next week, the commission will propose a directive on geological storage of CO2 that would require all new fossil-fuel combustion plants to have "suitable space on the installation site for the equipment necessary to capture and…